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Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Hitler's mentally ill cousin "killed in Nazi gas chamber"

By KATE CONNOLLY IN BERLIN

ADOLF Hitler's cousin was gassed under the Nazi policy of eliminating mental health patients, according to recently discovered documents.

The woman, identified only as Aloisia V, [Website: Definitely Aloisia Veit, see panel at right] died in a room pumped full of carbon monoxide in December 1940 at a medical institute in Austria. A stamp on her file was proof of her killing, said Timothy Ryback, an American historian.

David Irving comments: THE HINT is that because of his cousin's affliction, Hitler may have been similarly affected.    Not necessarily so. The real essence of this story is the fate of the luckless female, euthanasia -- a direction in which the world is once again drifting -- and not the revelation that Hitler had a mentally ill cousin, regardless of how close or distant, which is not revealed.    Statistically, we are all likely to have such relatives, since schizophrenia afflicts roughly one percent of the average population.    The incidence of schizophrenia is substantially higher in certain regions, e.g. the Black Caribbean, and Bavaria and Austria (in Germany there is also a historically greater prevalence of incestuous relationships, though they are not widely publicized: e.g. Adolf Hitler and his own close cousin, Geli Raubal; Erhard Milch's mother with her uncle Carl Bräuer, and he himself with his cousin, and so on). AS for the "revelation" by the American historian, he could have learned the first half of the story from the Introduction to my "Hitler's War" (Millennium Edition, 2002), ever since the 1991 edition (and for all we know, he did). Himmler, Hitler    As I reported in my Introduction, I had found in the archives at Princeton University a file called the Hitler Collection. This contained top secret papers looted from Hitler's Munich residence by a US army private, Eric Hamm:    "Most enigmatic of these documents," I wrote (page xxiii), "is one evidently originated by the Gestapo after 1940, typed on the special 'Führer typewriter,' reporting ugly rumours about Hitler's ancestry -- 'that the Führer was an illegitimate child, adoptive son of Alois, that the Führer's mother's name was Schicklgruber* before the adoption and that the Schicklgruber line has produced a string of idiots.'    "Among the latter," my Introduction continued," was a tax official, Joseph Veit, deceased in 1904 in Klagenfurt, Austria. One of his sons had committed suicide; a daughter had died in an asylum, a surviving daughter was half mad, and a third daughter was feebleminded. The Gestapo established that the family of Konrad Pacher of Graz had a dossier of photographs and certificates on all this. Himmler had them seized 'to prevent their misuse.'" * "In fact [I noted] Hitler's father was the illegitimate son of Maria Anna Schicklgruber. Nazi newspapers were repeatedly, e.g. on December 16, 1939, forbidden to speculate on his ancestry. ... The document quoted above is stamped with the highest security classification, Geheime Reichssache."

Historians say the discovery may explain why Hitler never wanted to talk about his family. Aloisia was 49, two years younger than Hitler, when she was murdered. She was related to him through his father's family, the Schicklgrubers.

The documents, discovered at the Vienna institution where she was treated, reveal that Nazi doctors diagnosed her as suffering from "schizophrenic mental instability, helplessness and depression, distraction, hallucinations and delusions."

She told doctors she was haunted by ghosts and the presence of a skull. She spent most of her time chained to an iron bed.

At one point she pleaded in a letter to be provided with poison so that she could kill herself. "I'm sure it would only require a small amount to free me from my appalling torture," she wrote.

Mr Ryback said: "Hitler's secrecy about his own family was legendary. After 60 years we now know why.

"This man really did have something to hide."

Nazi policy decreed that anyone with a mental or physical defect, even something as minor as a harelip, should be annihilated in pursuit of a pure and flawless Aryan race.

On his father's side, mental problems were rife in Hitler's family, with one relative committing suicide.

It is not clear if Hitler was aware of Aloisia's death.

David Irving's Hitler's War (free download)

Himmler's secret report on a seized Graz dossier on Hitler's ancestry

Magda Goebbels's stepfather Robert Friedländer died in Nazi Camp Buchenwald